


A study about color change

by everlovingfluff



Category: D.Gray-man
Genre: Canonical Character Death, dgmsecretsanta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-04
Updated: 2017-01-04
Packaged: 2018-09-14 17:13:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9195641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everlovingfluff/pseuds/everlovingfluff
Summary: Prompt: “Modern AU where Tiedoll takes in foster kids and takes care of them and his newest kid is Allen who just experienced his last adopted father’s death and doesn’t even have a last name. Allen has a hard time trusting anyone in the household, but slowly starts opening up until Mana’s extended family comes and wants to take him. Do as you wish with that, but would love Kanda and Allen friendship or even Alma&Kanda&Allen friendship. Would prefer no shipping between Allen and any character.”





	

He wanted to tell him how much he loved him, but sometimes it felt like his words fell on deaf ears. Whatever he’d try to get him to respond, to smile, to love someone again, he would fail, any progress he had made up to that point crumbling and burning to the ground.

  
Across the room, Tiedoll looked at Kanda and frowned. The kid was starting to tolerate Marie, but he detested Daisya with a passion, which brought upon him the teasing and playful remarks of the older boy. Alma was the only one who could get Kanda to open up and talk, but they have been together since he got into the same foster home as him.

  
Kanda was the youngest of them all, his temperament short, but not explosive with an eerie control for someone his age. If he would have to describe Kanda in one word that would be resentment. There was anger boiling under his skin, covered in a grim layer of acceptance. He was everything Tiedoll pittied about the world: emptiness as well as a bitter agreement with life.

  
While Kanda was rather violent with words and dolcile in his actions, Alma was the exact opposite. He loved talking and he could easily charm people, his optimism and easy going personality gaining him many friends, but his body sometimes acted against his own will, outbrusts of anger causing people to get hurt, even if he regreted it not many came back after witnessing them.

  
They worked somehow, Alma sharing his happiness with Kanda and Kanda teaching Alma how to control his own body. They were two outcasts, too rough around the edges to fit, but they were content with eachother.

  
“Mister Tiedoll?” a young girl, with long hair tied in a ponytail and dressed in casual clothes, asked. She had to be younger than eighteen years old and the way she held herself, low shoulders and rigid stance, suggested her inexperience and anxiety. ‘ _She must be a volunteer or similar_ ,’ he thought.

  
“Yes,” he smiled and got up from his seat. Marie and Daisya also followed his example, obviously used to their father’s antics by now. Alma did the same quickly, after he understood what was going on, but Kanda didnt move.

  
 “A meeting room has been prepared. If you would follow me, please,” she smiled, her shoulders relaxing when she saw the man’s calming smile. ”Of course, dear. Lead the way.”

  
The girl nodded and turned around. She opened a door at the end of the hallway and grabbed one of the keys from her belt.

  
“I must inform you that only one to three people are allowed to enter usually, but in this case.. well, only one of you will be let inside. Too many people at this moment could scare him. There are cameras in the room for the safety of both people inside. Someone will be watching to make sure everything is going well,” she told them, her voice getting more anxious the more she talked. Tiedoll chuckled and gently patted her shoulder.

  
“I understand. I will go now if that is all.”

  
She backed away from the door, letting him go in the room.

  
Inside, the walls were bare and gray, there were no windows, but the room was well illuminated. In the middle of the room was a table and two chairs on either side of it. Only one of them was empty as in the other was a child, no older than thirteen years. His hair was white (from trauma, Marie Antoinette syndrome they called it), half of his face was wrapped in bandages, along with one of his arms. He was staring blankly at the wall in front of him. He didn’t seem to have heard Tiedoll enter.

  
“Hello, dear,” he said and sat down. The child’s eyes turned to his face for a second and then he looked down at his hands. “My name is Tiedoll Froi. Marian, or Cross has you may know him, told me that you’re in need of a home. You see, I’ve worked here before, I am retired now, but I am intrested in adopting you. If you would be willing to come with me, of course,” he finished with a nod to himself, a way of reassuring his own mind that the words he had choosen were good and he did nothing to alarm the younger in anyway.

  
The boy didn’t respond, he continued to stare and show no signs that he had even heard Tiedoll. The silance streched on further, neither of them saying anything.

  
_‘Poor thing_ ,’ Tiedoll though. He was even worse than Alma when he was adopted, but he had the blank stare of Marie. Daisya and Kanda, even after their trauma, had fiery personalities, their actions were always fulled by their passion and agression, sometimes getting them into no brainer fights, which always ended up having negative consequences.

  
 “I,” the boy spoke, his voice rough from not using it. ‘ _Or from screaming_ ,’ he thought. “Can I… I want to- I want to go back home,” he raised his eyes to the older man in front of him. He was on the break of crying.

  
Tiedoll looked at the child and frowned. He didn’t expect this reaction. ‘ _What exactly had Marian told him?_ ’. He forced his face to relax. “I am sorry, dear, but you can’t go home. Tell me, do you know why?”

  
The kid was starting to panic now, but Tiedoll hold their eye contact all the while, grounding him. “I- I don’t… there was a fire. Mana- Mana didn’t get out, didn’t he?”

  
“I am sorry to say that he didn’t. But I am sure that he was happy you got out,” he said and reached for the child’s hand. He gently took hold of it. “Did you love your father?” He nodded. “And did he love you?” He shook his head yes again. Tiedoll smiled. “Then I am sure that he would want you to keep on living. Walk on your path and do right by him.” He was playing a dirty card, he knew, but there was no other way to pull the child out of this state of traslucent living, passing through life like a ghost.

  
The boy looked at him like a lost puppy, tears gathering in his eyes. “That’s what he used to say too,” he wiped his face with his sleeve quickly and shook his head. “Mana would always tell me to keep walking.”

  
“I’m glad that you’re feeling a little better, but the offer still stands. I will gladly adopt you, if you’d want. I have four other sons! My youngest is a little older than you, two or three years. You don’t have to decide now, you’re allowed how much time you want. I could even bring everyone later to meet you!”

  
He smiled shyly. “T-That would be nice. I-I would like to come with you, i-if that would be ok.”

  
“Oh?” he exclaimed, surprised. This was the first time someone chose this quickly. Tiedoll rubbed at his hands which suddently felt like they were covered in mud. The card was too dirty, it worked too good. He hated it. “Well then, I will go talk with Marian. Get the papers ready and we will go, ok?”

  
“Ok,” he responded weakly.

  
Tideoll got out of his chair and moved to the door, knowing that someone will come and take the boy to his room after he left.

  
“Ah!” he exclaimed suddently. “I have forgotten to ask you, my dear. What name do you go by? And would you like to keep your father’s family name after the adoption? Or you could even choose your own, if you’d want. That is what Yuu, my youngest, did.”

  
The kid looked uncomfortable and he bit his lip hard. “Allen. I- I go by Allen.I don’t… I don’t have any other name,” he mumbled. “Mana, he… he didn’t have one. Said that he didn’t remember.”

  
The man looked at him with sympathy, which made Allen blush and look down. He was feeling ashamed of his lack of identity. Everyone was someone. He was just Allen. Not even that on his bad days. He was a casuality in this world, one no one documanted, or even observed.

  
“Well then, you can take my name or you can choose whichever name you want. Usually things wouldn’t work like this, but I’m sure that we can pull a few strings behind the curtains without the public seeing,” he smiled and winked playfully. “Everything will turn out just fine, you’ll see, Allen. I will meet you in a few, ok?”

  
Allen nodded and tried to smiled back. “Ok.”

  
Allen remaind alone after Tiedoll left the room and he breathed heavily. He was going to be adopted again. ‘ _I’m sorry, Mana_.’

  
In the hallway two men were speaking, the tension between the two was palpable.

  
“Marian! What have you told the child?”

  
“Relax, Froi. I didn’t get to speak to him a lot. He just got out of a trauma induced coma. He didn’t remember what happend that well so I didn’t tell him so he wouldn’t enter a catatonic state. Pretty simple if you ask me,” a man with long ,red hair said. Half of his face was covered in a thin, satin sheet, offering him an air of sophisticated elegance.

  
Tiedoll frowned. “You avoided giving information to a patient, Marian. You have also called me to take him and gave me personal informatiom that I could use to make him come. Something is going on with him. You have no right to keep this information to yourself.”

  
“You’re insufferable,” Cross sighed. “Fine. I knew the boy’s father. His twin asked me to look after him. Mana kind of went a little bit cray-cray, if you know what I mean. He was really screwed up in the head. Thought his brother died, didnt remember that he had a family or even his own name. He was a seventeen year old in an old man’s body sometimes, he was no one other times,” Cross paused and looked at the door of the room where Allen was.

  
Someone has come to pick him up and move him to his room so he could get his things packed up. Froi looked at the little chair the boy was transported in. His body was still weak after that much time not doing nothing.

  
“I would have notified his family if I wouldn’t have known that right now, they would do more bad than good. His brother doesn’t yet know that Mana died or even that he adopted a child. Haven’t spoken to him in years. He also seems to have vanished. After a while I lost track of Mana. He had no destination, no logical pattern. The fire was a rude awakening. It reminded me that I made that foolish promise so many years ago to a man that is nowhere to be found. I can’t allow him to lose the only tie he has to his brother,” Cross said. He looked tired, his fifty years of life finally showing on his features.

  
Tiedoll rolled the information in his head, trying to find any hidden meaning, anything he heard, but didn’t look deeper into, but there was nothing. He was looking at a man who realised the consequences of his indifference. He made a promise he couldn’t keep to a man he couldn’t talk to anymore and someone died and someone else was suffering. He was trying to mend the situation, but more to clean his guilt than to truly express his altruism.

  
Cross was a man buried in conflicted emotions with far too much knowledge of what was happening around him. He couldn’t afford to show false compasion or force lies. That is why he always got the hard cases, the ones that were declared damned. He was one of the best at the Order Asylum after all.

  
Tiedoll sighed. “I will see what I can do. Allen is extremly infatuated with Mana. It will be hard to break him out of this character he made. Are you sure that he is imitating his mannerism? Couldn’t it be just that he is in shock?”

  
“As I told you on the phone, the kid is nothing like before. He was more like your brat than anything. A little firecraker with no sense of preservation. He is too meek, too submissive and too calm. The way he moves, the way he speaks, that’s all Mana,” he explained. Neither of them knew how this sudden shift happend, but they were going to try to change it for the sake of the boy’s mental stability.

  
“Ok. I will update you on his progress, but you will have to be honest with me from now on. I am not lying to this child or any other, for that matter. I want his file with everything that you think will help me with him. Understood, Marian?”  
Cross stared the man down for a few seconds, wanting for him to back down.

   
He was asking a lot. Telling him about the boy would mean searching through memories he long wished he would have forgotten. But Tiedoll wasn’t going to give in, that he knew. He was too much of a stubborn bastart, even if he looked gentle. No one got into their kind of buissness and remained without a backbone. The weak ones will fall apart along with the patients.

  
_‘Who ever wants to come will come, but just those that can will remain_ ,’ he used to say to Klaude whenever she would try to get him to be easier on the new doctors.

  
_‘Don’t get attached, don’t look , don’t see, don’t hear. Respond, help, listen_ ,’ he would tell them when they would ask for advice.

  
There was a fine line between him and the others, but while Cross was on the end of one spectrum, Tiedoll was on the other. Their ways so different, but as usefull as the other. Cross was a man of facts and study. A true specialist and innovator in the workings of the human brain, how it affected the body, how and with what pills it could be fixed.

  
Tiedoll was compasion reincarnated. He loved his patients and kept in touch with them long after they parted ways. He was willing to adopt the ones that needed a lot of time to recover. He knew how to make himself heard and he used experience more than written facts.

  
Both of them were good, the best even. Cross didn’t like to think about it.

  
“Fine. You’ve got it. I will send the file to you in a few days. You better not waste my time,” Cross said and turned around. “Just take the brat, already. Also, don’t indulge him. Whatever he might think he’s not _Mana_.”

  
Froi nodded and left. He did understand that Allen must have experienced a nervous shock that could have lead into other things. He could be going through a serious case of psychosis right now. He didn’t seem too anchored into reality so it might be a posibility.

  
He sighed. This was going to be by far one of his most complicated cases. He wasn’t going to back down though.

  
//

  
After a few months, Tiedoll thought, for the first time in his life, that he might give up. He started loving Allen as much as he did his other sons.

  
Allen fit well in in his little grup of trouble makers: he and Alma kicked it right off the bat, their personalities so much alike that there was no way that the two wouldn’t be attrached to eachother; Daisya took the role of a big brother immediatly, delighted by the idea of having another younger sibling; Marie was a welcomed voice of reason between the others, but his calming presence was changed by Allen who, somehow, managed to bathe it in mischief; and Kanda…

  
Kanda and Allen were always at eachother’s throat. Their traumas too alike, but their ways of coping too different. While Kanda’s spark became bigger, burned himself and everyone around, Allen’s had completly died down. Or so he throught. When those two argued, some of the Allen that Marian talked about ripped through the layers he put up and showed his teeth, his blood pumping faster with the need to attack, to wrap all his feelings of anger and hopelessness and throw them at whoever made him come out.

  
It was not a nice thought, that inside this boy he came to know rested such a dark and sad personality, so different from the one he loved. But he was confident that while he would selfishly mourn Allen when he’d be gone, he would come to love the one hidden so much more.

  
No one ever said that Tiedoll wasn’t a selfish man. No one said that he was cruel either. He loved with a passion and protected alike. If helping one of his sons ment that he would have to tear through flesh and blood to get them out, he would do it. But if he could do it slowly, waiting for them to come back out themselves he would rather choose that.

  
That is what he did with Kanda, with Alma, with Marie and so many others before them. He feared that he would have no choise with Allen.  
Marian’s file didn’t help that much. Every diagnostic was written in his usual cold indifference, nothing more than he deduced himself after spending sometime with the boy.

  
Allen’s history was cruel and lonely. He was born with a birth defect that didn’t allow him to move his hand, it was a deadweight that he had to carry. Allen was left in a foster home, which closed when he was around seven years old. He proceeded to live on the streets on his own until he was found and adopted by Mana, who died a few years later in a fire which has also further damaged Allen’s arm, scarred his eye and exposed him to more trauma than before.

  
Mana. Such an intersting individual. The more he found out about that man the more he sustained his opinion: The man was crazy. There was no way around it. Marian has told him enough for him to know that when he took Allen, but he never thought that the damage could run this deep.

  
The problem was that Mana’s actions deeply scarred Allen. He might not realise it, but the fact that after his death Allen kept Mana living by _becoming_ him, was already proof enough.

  
Allen still didn’t trust them completly, but he sometimes slipped. He turned his head whenever certain names were called in public (Neah and Red were one of the most prominent ones, Tiedoll observed), he knew far too much about how to take care of others (something he observed after Alma got sick a few weeks ago) and he acted like _Tiedoll_ was the child and not him (too many times Froi asked himself if Mana adopted Allen or the other way around).

  
Something must have happend. Somehow Allen decided to tie his life with Mana’s, to keep him living even after his death. Allen gave his body and mind up, fully willing to be someone else for the sake of that person. It wasn’t healthy. Tiedoll doubted that it was reciprocated; Allen knew nothing about love as he was rather a fan of obsessing over those he cared about.

  
He could see that the more time he spend with the others. Allen had a tendency to put others on a pedestal. He would fight for them without a second thought if the oportunity showed up. It was almost like he wated to prove that he could fight, protect, love. He would give his all to others. He tried to make himself a big figure in other’s lives. Unforgettable. A sure factor for others.  
He was scared, Tiedoll figured. Allen was scared of being left behind.

  
_What had happend to him?_

_  
_ //

  
After Allen spent almost a year in his new home things started to settle. He becoming friends with the kids from the neighbourhood. He got along with Lenalee, one of the girls Tiedoll once had under his care until her brother picked her up, Lavi, Link, and even people like Krory and Miranda.

  
Things seemed to be looking up for them.

  
Kanda and Allen had developed a weird friendship. While the older boy became more and more relaxed since he had someone to take all his pent up anger on, Allen started being more like, well, _himself._

 _  
_ He was happy, but sometimes the memories dragged him down. It was a slow, but sure progress and Tiedoll had never been prouder of his youngest sons. Whenever the two argued he could feel the misplaced affection they tried to hide but failed. Tiedoll felt like crying whenever they would help the other in an nonchalant way, almost without thinking. So he did. 

  
He was almost always over the two of them, showering them with affection. Alma and Marie usually watched amused on the sidelines while Daisya laughed.

  
Things were good. They were good. Tiedoll had hope for their future.

  
//

  
In the years that followed, Marie went to college – he wanted to pursue medicine, become a surgeon, as he wished to help people like him, but his blindness stopped him. He settled on psychology instead- Daisya became a profesional football player and chased his dream to be on the national team. Alma had signed himself up for anger management classes, which helped built over the fundation Tiedoll built.

  
Kanda has became a sword’s master. People all around the world knew about him. He and Alma opened a little buisness, which has blown up so fast that they already had to expand in other countries.

  
And Allen… Allen has progressed a lot since he came to them. After two years with him, his uncle’s family came to pick him up (after Cross decided that he was stable enough to meet them), but they kept in touch. Allen spent every holiday with his first family and he prefered them over his new one (none of them would ever admit how smug they were about that). 

  
He and Cross had met on multiple occasions and after a long talk with Tiedoll and the Order, Cross had became Allen’s personal therapist (he was the one that brought Allen’s true personality out the most, even more than Kanda). As odd as that may sound, they made a good pair. Marian wouldn’t let Allen navigate around the subject and Allen couldn’t sweet talk him.

  
They were good. Fantastic even. Everything played out nicely, and now his sons were happy and healthy. Living on their own. Huh. The house was so empty now. 

  
Tiedoll looked at the file that appeared on his desk. _It is from Klaude? What would she want from him?_ He opened it and looked at the name.

  
_TIMOTHY HEAREST, AGE 13._

_  
_ Lookes like Tiedoll wasn’t finished either.


End file.
